Instrumentation:

Programme Note:Human beings have always conceived of basic elements, the building blocks of all things: the early ancient Greeks had four elements – earth, air, water, fire – and Buddhist cosmology had the same four but added a fifth – śūnyatā, the void. Over the millennia, our collective conception of the smallest possible indivisible element has shrunk; muons – elementary particles which naturally occur and indeed pass through our bodies, and everything else on earth, in inconceivably high numbers every moment – are among the current set. This piece is my first to use field recordings. As human civilisation becomes ever more damaging to the ecosystems of which it is a part, my music has become more and more about nature and the humankind's relationship with it. Most of the percussive instruments used in this piece are made with natural materials, and most of the sound sources are recordings of green spaces within cityscapes – including Winnipeg (Canada), Tongyeong (South Korea), London (UK), and Kyōto and Kamakura (Japan). They are places with resonant histories, places where important historico-political events occurred. They are also places where sounds of nature dominate, though not exclusively. Human-made sounds intermingle with the natural ones. At first the percussionist, imitating the insistent rhythms of a woodpecker using stones, sounds in the resonant silence which follows the crack of bamboo recorded in a Kamakura garden and which functions as the timekeeper for this piece. Gradually the live percussive sounds are joined by recordings which sound 'natural', of nature. But these soundscapes too are not without human-made sounds. But is to even make the distinction between 'natural' and 'human-made' to elevate ourselves too highly? Are we not animals, and is there anything we do which is not natural? If we are destroying nature, are we not just destroying ourselves?